Dear New Brunswick Politicians

As we all spent yesterday and today learning about what the procedure actually is when there is no majority government and the current government has fewer seats than the opposition (there’s some lessons there I don’t remember from Grade 9 Social Studies) one theme kept recurring over and over: we’ll be back to the polls soon.

Please don’t.

We can’t afford to go through another campaign: financially or socially. If there’s one big takeaway from the election results, there is a very clear divide In how we see the province. Creating more division won’t help anyone.

You have been presented with a unique opportunity; not the one you wanted, but it’s the one you have. Post election politics at its core should be about uniting; putting the divisiveness of the campaign behind and moving forward for the best of everyone. We don’t see that happen often enough.

I think as New Brunswickers we deserve to have the people we elected, regardless of political colour, try to do that. Think about what you heard going door to door. Not from the people who agreed with you, but from the people who didn’t. What were their reasons? Is there something you can take away from that? Surely there were some ideas from the other side that made you wish you’d thought of them first?

Please try to find the common ground.

Education, healthcare, infrastructure and our financial future are huge issues. We need you to be working on those, not trying to be the winner. If we keep repeating the past month there will be no winners, only a population that becomes more and more disenfranchised with each passing day.

True leadership isn’t sound bites and photo ops. More frequently it happens behind closed doors, in discussions and compromises that may never become public knowledge. That is what we need now; time will tell if it’s what we get.